Human trafficking is a global problem, and children are uniquely vulnerable. Almost one third of all trafficking victims worldwide are children. “Orphanage trafficking,” is defined as the recruitment or transfer of children from their families into orphanages for a purpose of exploitation or profit. The trafficking of children into orphanages encompasses those who receive, transport and harbor these children. Traffickers may be orphanage directors or staff, recruiters who search for children (sometimes called “child finders”), community leaders or members, or civil servants seeking to personally profit from referring children into care.

It has strong links to foreign aid sourced largely from Western donor countries, illicit international adoption rings, and “voluntourism” schemes that cater to tourists seeking international volunteer opportunities. The cycle of trauma is perpetuated when voluntourists form connections with the children only to depart, reinforcing the belief that those who care will eventually leave. To meet revenue goals or to meet the demand generated by tourists seeking to volunteer with “orphans,” large numbers of children are recruited into orphanages where they are exploited. Of the estimated 8 million children living in orphanages around the world, it is unknown what proportion have been trafficked. However, concerns have been widely expressed about the prevalence of unregistered and unlawfully operating orphanages that continue to admit children.

Orphanage traffickers target children who are uniquely susceptible to trafficking due to poverty, lack of access to education or other services, or other family crises. False promises of support, good education and other opportunities are often made to families during recruitment to entice them to relinquish their children. Unbeknownst to most volunteers and donors, up to 80% of the children in these orphanages have at least one living parent and other living kin. They are often called “paper orphans” due to falsification of documents vouching for parental death or abandonment.  Once living in a residential care setting, traffickers continually employ false orphan narratives to elicit sympathy and international funding.

Additionally, orphanage trafficking has become a more prominent topic due to the trafficking of children from Ukraine to Russia. A February 2023 Conflict Observatory report found that approximately 6,000 Ukrainian children have been taken by the Russian Government for pro-Russia re-education and, in some cases, military training. Some children were recruited into a network of 43 recreational camps for “ostensible vacations”. Others were taken to orphanages or institutional facilities for children in Russian linked to the Russian foster and adoption systems. In both cases, parental consent for their children’s engagement was reportedly extracted under duress and routinely violated. This is why in March of 2023 the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a war crimes arrest warrant for Putin for the deportation of Ukrainian children.

Orphanage trafficking is a particularly heinous crime that exploits the most vulnerable of our society. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 8.7 calls for “immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of of human trafficking.” To enhance efforts to meet this goal, we believe SDG 8.7 should be expanded to include explicit recognition of trafficking of children into orphanages and other residential care facilities, a hidden yet growing epidemic within our modern world. The stripping of basic human rights from these children is an injustice that can be combated in part by stopping the demand for international voluntourism and curtailing foreign funding of residential care facilities, particularly those operating in contravention of law and policy.

While children are affected by all the legislation and policy that we adopt at European level, in the European Parliament (EP) there is no Parliamentary committee that has specific responsibility for children. The Intergroup on Children’s Rights represents the first formal body in the EP that will mainstream children’s rights and assess the impact of legislative and non-legislative work on children.

It is a cross-party, a cross-national group of committed MEPs, who will work together with child-focused organisations to keep children’s rights on top of the EU agenda. The aim of the Intergroup is to promote children’s rights and ensure that the best interest of the child is taken into account in EU internal and external action.

To do so, the Intergroup has nominated child rights focal points in each parliamentary committee, who alert the Intergroup on the files that have an impact on children. The Intergroup’s work is based on the Child Rights Manifesto prepared by a coalition of child-focused organisations working towards the realisation of the EU’s legal and policy commitments to promote and protect children’s rights, and obligations set out in the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Support the re-establishment of the Intergroup

Mia Dambach

PhD candidate / self funded

Name

M. Dambach

UNICEF pilots innovative approaches aimed at breaking the cycle of child poverty and social exclusion

Poverty and social exclusion can have a profound impact on the lives of children, preventing them from accessing basic services such as healthcare, education, nutritious food, quality housing and childcare. For the poorest families, including those who do not have access to social protection, the situation is dire. Children suffer poverty differently from adults and they are more likely to experience lifelong consequences from it.  Malnutrition can last a lifetime, having long-term consequences on children’s physical, social and emotional development. And losses in learning at a young age can result in children falling behind in school, finding it difficult to ever catch up. Without access to health care, children could miss out on vaccines that could be life-saving in later years and the treatment necessary to grow up healthy and thrive.

The Child Guarantee aims to ensure that vulnerable children have access to these quality services. UNICEF, in partnership with the European Commission, is working with national and sub-national authorities and select civil society organisations, children and young people to design and implement services and interventions that reduce the effects of poverty and social exclusion on children in need of support and protection. This includes the most vulnerable children, such as Roma children, children in institutional care, children with disabilities and refugee and migrant children. 

'I was laying on him, and he was acting bad.'

A10-year-old foster child in Indiana died days after the morbidly obese woman he temporarily was living with allegedly sat on him until he no longer had a pulse. Officials said the boy pleaded with a neighbor to adopt him just 30 minutes before first responders arrived at the scene.

The heartbreaking tale begins more than five years ago when Dakota Levi Stevens and his sister were placed in the foster-care system because their parents were addicted to drugs. It seems that Dakota bounced around several foster-care placements during his young life. He also suffered from mental health and anxiety issues, according to a foster father who cared for Dakota from 2019 to 2021.

When Wilson saw that his eyelids were pale, she instructed one of her three children — all of whom were adopted out of foster care — to call 911.

In 2022, Dakota landed in the home of Jennifer Lee Wilson but later left. When Dakota began acting up at a foster home earlier this year, he was placed back into Wilson's home for short-term respite care.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/14/chiles-stolen-children-a-new-effort-offers-hope-to-pinochet-era-international-adoptees?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR2Izo0QvWDBCv-HZZLXxlfnsXtmUkS7_xj1ixA06jbrBDPsdRY3sKkY5k4_aem_fzoWAOCPHJpMTD5isVrhig

Thousands of children were adopted abroad during the Pinochet dictatorship – many in murky circumstances

Mirjam Hunze grew up in the quiet Dutch town of Lunteren, but always felt too loud, too different, too curious in her strict Protestant household. She was 10 years old when she found out she had been adopted from Chile, sparking a lifelong quest to find her biological family. Hunze’s Chilean birth certificate and passport listed her Dutch adoptive name, with the fields for her biological parents and place of birth conspicuously crossed out.

The gang is accused of coaxing poor parents to give up their newborns for adoption, after which videos of the children — along with their “prices” — would be shared with prospective buyers

Like clockwork each day, officers at the Begumpur Police Station in New Delhi have been receiving two calls for the past six months from Punjab — one from a farmer in Firozpur district and the other from a wedding photographer in Muktsar district. Both callers ask them the same question: “Test report aaya kya sir (has the test report come)?”

The report of the DNA test they have been enquiring about will determine who would finally take home the six-month-old unnamed girl, living under the care of a West Delhi-based NGO since she was rescued from Rohini’s Begampur colony on February 20 from a gang accused of selling babies. She was barely 10 days old at the time of her rescue.

The gang is accused of coaxing poor parents to give up their newborns for adoption, after which videos of the children — along with their “prices” — would be shared with prospective buyers. According to the chargesheet filed in the case in a Rohini court recently, nine persons, including two Punjab-based ASHA workers and a midwife who ran a clinic there, have been named as accused under Indian Penal Code (IPC) Sections 370 (4) (trafficking), 120B (pertaining to conspiracy) and 34 (pertaining to common intention).

When the police arrested ASHA workers Simranjeet Kaur and Pooja Rani in connection with the racket, they stumbled upon blank stamp papers bearing the signatures of Lek Singh and Amandeep, besides copies of their Aadhaar cards. Lek Singh and Amandeep were then tracked to their villages in Punjab.

DEHRADUN: For once, no one was attached to the police lines. The opposite happened, in fact. The police lines, this one in Pithoragarh, got attached to a young orphan girl. So much so that cops in the Uttarakhand station got together to organise her wedding to a local boy, laying out a grand feast for locals.

The usually austere place — commonly used to accommodate reserve forces or receive cops on punishment posting — turned into a radiant wedding venue on Tuesday, the touching event led by none other than their superintendent.

But then, the story of Pushpa Bhatt, the 21-year-old bride, would melt any heart. Pushpa lost both her parents when she was five years old. Raised by her grandmother, the elderly woman too died just as Pushpa stepped into her 10th year. Left an orphan, she relied on the kindness of strangers to get by in life.

About 25 days ago, Pushpa came to Pithoragarh city from her home in Balwakot in search of work. Reserve inspector Naresh Chandra Jakhmola found her sitting alone by the roadside and, being a cop, asked her a string of questions. By the time Pushpa answered them, Jakhmola had decided that he wanted to adopt her.

Jakhmola told TOI on Friday: “I saw her as a blessing from Ma Durga. I have two sons, and when I met Pushpa, I knew she was the daughter I never had. I told her, ‘You are my daughter now and have nothing to worry about,’ and brought her home. My family welcomed her wholeheartedly.”

As luck would have it, a week later Jakhmola was contacted by his son’s mother-in-law, who was looking for a bride for a relative. Seeing it as a sign, Jakhmola introduced Pushpa to the family. Despite Pushpa’s slight disability in one leg, Bipin Upadhyay, who works at a TV cable office in Dharchula, agreed to marry her. Pushpa happily consented.

Jakhmola informed SP Rekha Yadav about the situation and expressed his desire to get Pushpa married off traditionally and with pomp. “When I heard about it, I thought it was a noble idea and immediately pledged the district police unit’s support. We all contributed voluntarily to organise the wedding at the district police lines. Pushpa is now not just Jakhmola’s daughter, but the daughter of the whole district police unit,” Yadav said.

The State Duma has begun considering a bill banning the adoption of children from Russia by citizens of countries that permit gender transition through medical intervention or changes to identity documents. This was reported by State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin.

"We are, in essence, introducing a ban on the adoption of children by citizens of NATO countries, since the overwhelming majority of them permit gender reassignment at the legislative level," the explanatory note to the document says.

As noted in the bill, the ban is aimed at implementing state policy to eliminate any possibility of adoption of Russian children by representatives of the LGBT community.

The State Duma drafted a bill in May to completely ban adoption of a child by foreign citizens if gender reassignment is permitted in their country. The Russian Orthodox Church proposed introducing such a ban a year ago.

The police arrested a couple who were planning to adopt a child, two women who orchestrated the child trafficking and the couple’s relative who acted as a mediator in the business.

A team of Delhi Police, after a week-long search, rescued a toddler who was kidnapped and allegedly sold to a childless couple in Vrindavan, 210 kilometres away from Budh Vihar from where he was reported missing.

The police arrested a couple who were planning to adopt a child, three others, including two women who orchestrated the child trafficking and the couple’s relative who acted as a mediator in the business.

“The missing child has been rescued safely. Efforts are being made to nab one more accused,” Jimmy Chiram, DCP Outer District, said.

According to the police, the one-year-old child was abducted from Kanjhawala Road, near Rajni Gupta Hospital, around 10.30 pm on July 6.